Anne Frank's full diary on display in Amsterdam for museum's 50 years at her WWII hiding place

Anne Frank's full diary on display in Amsterdam for museum's 50 years at her WWII hiding place

By Arthur Max
Associated Press
April 29, 2010

AMSTERDAM - Nearly all of Anne Frank's diary went on display Wednesday for the first time at the house where she wrote it during the two years the Jewish teenager was in hiding from the Nazis.

The notebooks and pages that comprise the World War II diary have been moved into the Anne Frank House museum to mark 50 years since it opened its doors to the public.

Dutch Queen Beatrix opened the exhibition, then attended a commemoration at the 17th century Western Church a few dozen steps from museum.

The original red plaid diary in which Anne began writing on her 13th birthday has been at the museum for several years.

But that covered just six months of the 25 months she hid with her family and four other Jews in a concealed canal-side apartment in Amsterdam. Two other school exercise books and other pages were stored at the Netherlands War Documentation Center, the government war archives.

Now on display are the three parts of the diary, a book of short stories she wrote called "Tales from the Secret Annex," and a notebook of her favorite quotations.

Anne also wrote 360 loose pages written on flimsy paper, mostly revising earlier diary entries with the intention of publishing it after the war. Because of the papers' fragile state, the museum said it will display 40 sheets at a time and rotate them.

The diary and other papers have all been studied, published and in some cases reproduced in replicas. But it will be the first time visitors see nearly the full collection in Anne's own hand in one place.

The museum also launched a "Secret Annex Online" on its website Wednesday, allowing people to tour it online.

"The generation of people who experienced the war and Nazi persecution of the Jews is shrinking fast," said former Prime Minister Wim Kok at the church ceremony. "Their stories must be kept alive and passed on to new generations. The Anne Frank House is one of the places where that happens."

The diary has been translated into dozens of languages, has been read by millions of people and is on the curriculum of many schools.

The cramped apartment, with two stories and a small attic, was restored and opened to the public on May 3, 1960, by Anne's father, Otto Frank, the only survivor among the eight Jews who hid there.

The museum now includes the front of the building, where Otto Frank once had a warehouse and office, and a new building next door. It receives about 1 million visitors a year, compared with 9,000 the first year.

The diary chronicles Anne's life and coming of age from June 12, 1942, until August 1, 1944. The house was raided three days later and its occupants deported to Germany. Anne died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, about two weeks before the camp was liberated.